Greetings Combatants of the Glorious Alliance and the Merciless Horde!
It is my great honor to invite you all to test your skills, steel, and sorcery against Blizzard employees such as myself (watch the face though, I got an image to maintain).

So if a bit of You vs. Blue action sounds like your idea of a good time come on down to the 4.3.2 PTRs this Tuesday, January 17th. We’ll be queuing for Rated Battlegrounds from 3pm-6pm PST, you’ll know it’s us from our [Blizzard Horde] & [Blizzard Alliance] guild names.

Hope to see you on the fields of battle!

Rogue

• Adrenaline Rush no longer triggers a global cooldown.

Dungeons & Raids

• Baradin Hold
  • The roaming Eyes of Occu’thar have been replaced by hateful creatures who serve Alizabal.
• Dragon Soul
  • Warmaster Blackhorn
    • The visual warning for Twilight Elites’ Blade Rush should be easier to see.

Items

• Vial of Shadows damage (Lightning Strike) has been reduced to approximately one-third of previous damage. However, it will now trigger approximately 3 times as often. This is intended to keep overall DPS the same while reducing burst damage, especially in PvP.

We’ve seen a lot of discussion and debate over
the new set bonuses. Just so everyone is aware, we’re still assessing the set
bonuses for tier 12 as we go through more testing and gathering more feedback.

To give you a heads up on what we’re looking at so far though, here are
the most recent bonuses we have in mind for some of the sets (some of what’s
listed below are amendments to the existing bonuses on the PTR).

Some of
these bonuses might already be live as of the build pushed earlier this week,
while some are yet to be implemented. If your class/specialization isn’t listed
here, it means the bonuses either haven’t changed, or the changes haven’t been
solidified. Just the same, all of this is subject to ch-ch-changes over the
course of the PTR process. Your feedback is appreciated!

• Blood Death Knight 4-Piece: The bonus to parry from Dancing Rune Weapon now
  begins when Dancing Rune Weapon wears off, instead of lasting while Dancing Rune
  Weapon is active.
• Frost/Unholy Death Knight 4-Piece: Old bonus removed and replaced — Your
  Obliterate and Scourge Strike abilities deal 6% additional damage as Fire damage
  over 4 seconds.
• Feral Druid 4-Piece: The bonus to dodge from Barkskin now begins when
  Barkskin wears off, instead of lasting while Barkskin is active.
• Restoration Druid 4-Piece: Old bonus removed and replaced — Your Swiftmend
  also heals an injured target within 8 yards for the same amount.
• Holy Paladin 2-Piece: Old bonus removed and replaced — Healing with Holy
  Shock has a 40% chance to grant you 6% of your base mana.
• Holy Paladin 4-Piece: Old bonus removed and replaced — Your Divine Light,
  Flash of Light, and Holy Light spells also heal an injured target within 8 yards
  for 10% of the amount healed.
• Protection Paladin 4-Piece: The bonus to parry from Divine Protection now
  begins when Divine Protection wears off, instead of lasting while Divine
  Protection is active.
• Holy/Discipline Priest 2-Piece: Now also triggers from casting Prayer of
  Mending.
• Holy/Discipline Priest 4-Piece: Old bonus removed and replaced — You have a
  chance when you cast a helpful spell to summon a Cauterizing Flame at the
  target’s location. Each second the Cauterizing Flame will heal an injured party
  member within 20 yards for 9250 to 10750 health. Lasts 5 seconds.
• Shadow Priest 2-Piece: Now requires the priest to be in Shadowform to be
  active.
• Warlock 4-Piece: Now also triggers from casting Drain Soul.
• Arms/Fury Warrior 2-Piece: Old bonus removed and replaced — Your Battle
  Shout and Commanding Shout abilities grant you an additional 35 rage. Cannot
  occur more often than once every 60 seconds.
• Protection Warrior 4-Piece: The bonus to parry from Shield Wall now begins
  when Shield Wall wears off, instead of lasting while Shield Wall is
  active.

So, as many of you are interpreting this change,
it is to encourage more participation in Rated Battlegrounds. We see the fact
that participating in Arenas is by far the superior way of obtaining top-notch
PvP gear, in terms of time investment, as a problem. If you want to maximize
your Conquest Point gains in patch 4.2, you’ll need to participate at least a
little bit in Rated Battlegrounds.

We know this may not sound very
appealing to those of you who have grown accustomed to spending as little as an
hour a week getting the top PvP currency in the game via Arenas over the last
couple of expansions. To put things in perspective though, the total number of
items that can be purchased with Conquest Points today is much larger than what
you used to be able to buy with Arena Points pre-Deathwing world explosion. And
there is no longer a requirement to “grind” unrated BGs for Honor each season,
so the real time investment isn’t changing as much as some players are
perceiving it to be.

On top of that, the frank reality is that the total
time investment required in season 9 to get all your points has been much, much
too low, as you could do that from a few 2v2 Arena games each week completed in
less than an hour’s time. It shows that Rated Battlegrounds are currently
sub-par in terms of the rate at which points can be accumulated.

We do
feel this change is necessary to keep the time investment vs. high-quality item
accumulation in check, even if it doesn’t read well on paper. However, as
always, your constructive feedback is welcomed.

We’ve been repeatedly saying in various threads
recently that we are listening, even if we’re not acting on every piece of
feedback we read. Well readers, listen up!

With the help of
Ghostcrawler, the following will be added to the patch notes for the next PTR
update:

• Players are once again free to dance in combat (without causing graphic
  errors). Other animations, such as attacks, will take precedence over dancing.
  The dance animation will be suppressed until the higher priority animation is
  complete. Fun has been unnerfed.

The concerns of the people
vanished. And there was much dancing.

“Since WotLK came out healing has been all about keeping everyone topped
off. Full green bars. But since Cata, healing has shifted to a Triage mindset
and it’s been a rather difficult one to adjust to. Just remember, healing now
means you have to prioritize who gets heals and when. Your job isn’t to keep
everyone at 100%, it’s to keep everyone from reaching 0%. Don’t stress and stay
focused! It takes practice but eventually you get used to it.”

Submitted by: Ashella

The Top Ten is a contest run by WoW Vault with content chosen for the list
from among the replies! Whichever reply gets chosen as #1 will receive 2 weeks
if IGN Insider VIP!

Disclaimer: Winners with too many ToS violations on
their account may not be eligible to receive the reward.

Death Knight

• Rage of Rivendare again applies 15/30/45% additional damage to Plague, Scourge, and Festering Strike, up from 12/24/36%.

Druid

• Swipe (Cat) damage has been doubled.
• Berserk is no longer on the global cooldown.

Paladin

• Selfless Healer: The damage bonus from this talent now has a 30-second duration, up from 10.

Shaman

• Grounding Totem cooldown has been increased to 25 seconds, up from 15.
• Earth Shield healing done by Restoration shaman has been reduced by 20%.
• Nature’s Blessing has been improved to 6/12/18% bonus direct healing on Earth Shielded targets, up from 5/10/15%.
• Glyph of Grounding Totem now increases the cooldown of the ability by 35 seconds, down from 45 seconds.

Warrior

• Improved Hamstring now reduces the global cooldown on Hamstring by 0.5/1 0.25/0.5 seconds in addition to its current effects.

Dungeons & Raids

• Players will now get bonus rewards 7 times per week (while earning less than 980 Valor Points) instead of once a day when using Dungeon Finder.
• When there is only 1 player left in a Dungeon Finder group, they will now be able to queue for replacements as long as they queue within 2 minutes or stay in the dungeon.
• Once the dungeon is completed the eligible player will receive a Satchel of Exotic Mysteries (account bound) with various potential rewards including: gold, rare gems, non-combat pets, and (very rare) mounts.

Guilds

• The criteria on many of the profession-related guild achievements has been significantly reduced.

Items

• The caster shaman 4-piece PvP set bonus now reduces the cooldown of Grounding Totem by 3 seconds, up from 1.5.

UI

• The Network category contains the options “Optimize network for speed” and “Enable IPv6 when available”. “Optimize network for speed” will be enabled by default, and will send packets more frequently at the cost of higher bandwidth. The higher bandwidth may lead to disconnects for some players who have limited bandwidth. Players getting disconnected frequently should try unchecking this box.

BlizzCon® is a celebration of the global player communities surrounding the Warcraft®, StarCraft®, and Diablo® universes. This two-day event features discussion panels with Blizzard Entertainment developers, hands-on play time with the latest versions of Blizzard Entertainment games, professional and casual eSports tournaments for players to showcase their talents, social events for players and developers to meet one another, community contests with great prizes, and much more.

Tickets to attend BlizzCon 2011 will go on sale in two batches on Saturday, May 21 at 10 a.m. Pacific Time and Wednesday, May 25 at 7 p.m. Pacific Time. Visit the official BlizzCon website or the online Blizzard Store on either of these dates for a chance to purchase tickets.

On-Sale Dates:

Saturday, May 21 at 10 a.m. Pacific Time

Wednesday, May 25 at 7 p.m. Pacific Time

Price: $175 USD each (limit 4 per household)

What’s Included:

• One BlizzCon badge that grants access to the convention.
• BlizzCon goody bag containing exclusive swag (contents to be announced)
• Opportunity to participate in a limited-time, online BlizzCon merchandise sale before the show (details to be announced)

“The “L” key on your keyboard opens up your Quest Journal. This handy-dandy little item contains literally all the information you need to solve whatever quest you are given. The “M” key on your keyboard opens up your map. Quest Helper is automatically enabled so your quest objectives will be clearly marked on the map. Check it early and check it often.”

Submitted by: Syia

We’ve been following discussions and reading feedback on the Dungeon Finder Call to Arms feature, and appreciate everyone’s opinions on the topic. We wanted to share a few items though that supplement the recent announcement:

The additional reward for completing the Dungeon Finder Call to Arms (called the Satchel of Exotic Mysteries) will be Bind on Account; able to be freely sent to other characters on your account once you receive it.

An error existed in the announcement regarding flasks and potions being picked based on your spec. This is not the case. If someone earns a Satchel of Exotic Mysteries, and if it rolls the random chance to provide a potion or flask, it will be a randomly selected. This helps ensure a broad array of available flasks and potions for all characters.

We also wanted to clarify, mounts that have a possibility to be found in a Satchel of Exotic Mysteries are found with the same rarity as if you had slain the dungeon boss that normally drops them.

General

• Flying mounts can now be used in Ghostlands.
• Honor is now purchasable from the Justice Commodities Vendor at 250 Honor per 375 Justice.
• Justice is now purchasable from the Honor Commodities Vendor at 250 Justice per 375 Honor.
• Conquest is now purchasable from the Valor vendor at 250 Conquest per 250 Valor.

Classes

• 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. There are currently some issues with this new change which are affecting several of these abilities and is not working as intended at this time.

Druid

• Enrage no longer increases physical damage taken

Hunter

• Deterrence: The area damage of the paladin ability Hammer of the Righteous will no longer hit Hunters with Deterrence active.

Mage

• Frost Armor has been reworked:
  • It now reduces physical damage taken by 15%, instead of providing 20% additional armor.
  • The Chilled proc from Frost Armor can no longer proc Fingers of Frost.
  • The attack speed slow from the Chilled proc is now 20%, down from 25%, but it also affects ranged attack speed.
  • Frost Armor also no longer increases Frost resistance.

Paladin

• Selfless Healer: The damage bonus from this talent now has a 30 sec duration instead of 10 sec.
• Avenger’s Shield can no longer be blocked.
• Judgements of the Just debuff can no longer trigger talents and other effects.
• Seal of Truth: Fixed a tooltip error that stated swings at targets with Censure fully stacked dealt 9% weapon damage. They actually dealt 15% damage and the tooltip has been updated accordingly.

Warlock

• Dark Intent: The friendly target of this ability now receives 1% (stacking 3 times to 3%) periodic spell damage and healing bonus instead of 3% (stacking 3 times to 9%). The casting Warlock still receives 3% (stacking 3 times to 9%).

Dungeons & Raids

• The Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms will now identify which class role is currently the least represented in the queue, and offer them additional rewards for entering the Dungeon Finder queue and completing a random level-85 Heroic dungeon.
  • The least represented class icon will show within the Dungeon Finder to indicate the role that is eligible to earn the bonus reward.
  • Players must queue solo with the currently indicated least represented class (by the system) and complete the dungeon up to and including the final boss in order to be eligible for the bonus reward.
  • The bonus reward will be displayed to eligible (system identified as least represented) classes within the UI.
  • Once the dungeon is completed the eligible player will receive a goodie bag with various potential rewards including: gold, rare gems, non-combat pets, and (very rare) mounts.
• Bastion of Twilight
  • Sinestra
    • Twilight Slicer is now less likely to target two helers at once.
    • Wrack will avoid jumping to tanks.
• Halls of Origination
  • Temple Gardian Anhuur should now properly go into his Shield Phase at 33% even if he was channeling his 66% shield phase.
• Lost City of Tol’vir
  • Soul Fragments that spawn during the High Prophet Barim encounter should now perform an emote when they merge with the Harbinger of Darkness.

Guild Challenges

• Gold rewards require the qualified guild members of the group to be honored with their guild, and the guild must be are now deposited into the guild bank once the guild reaches level 5. The text for the Cash Flow guild perk has been updated appropriately.

Quests & Creatures

• New Cooking and Fishing Dailies have been added to Darnassus, Ironforge, Thunder Bluff, and Undercity.

User Interface

• Targets and focus targets now display on the mini-map.
• Moved Video and Sound to a new “Options” screen.
• Added a network category to the new Options screen and included the two network checkboxes.
  • The Network category contains the options “Optimize network for speed” and “Enable IPv6 when available”.
• Visual Settings Updates
  • Removed the red bar preventing the overall graphics slider from going to ultra based on computer specs.
  • When the user moves the overall slider to a setting that would have previously been prevented, any option that can’t go as high as that setting will get the warning icon with a tooltip explaining why it can’t go higher. For example: The user sets the overall slider to Ultra and the water setting can only go to Fair. The water setting would automatically switch to Fair.
  • Support for DirectX 11 can now be found in the Advanced tab of the Options screen.
• At the login screen:
  • Moved the “Reset User Options” button from the popup window that appears when you click Options to the actual Options window.
  • Clicking Options now goes directly to the Video tab of the Options screen.
  • Removed the now-unneeded popup.
• The New Features (!) Option Screen has been updated:
  • Cast action keybinds on key down (Combat)
  • Pick Up Action Key (ActionBars)
  • Nameplate Motion Type (Names)
  • Graphics API (Advanced)
  • Network category

“Did you know? Sometimes you can buy enchanting shards, break them into smaller shards, and sell them for a profit!”

So how is the view from way up here? It’s great actually — we’re really happy with how Cataclysm is going so far, and we have big surprises on the horizon. On the other hand, there are details you can see at ground level that you can’t make out from 10,000 feet.

When we started these blogs, the idea was to foster developer communication to the players without some of the inherent problems of posting in forums. Some players have pointed out recently, and we totally agree, that the blogs up until now have been from a very high vantage point. We looked for topics with universal interest that would feel important and newsworthy. That has worked overall, but we also feel like we’ve lost something from when I used to be down in the metaphorical trenches talking to players in the forums.

So we’re going to try something a little different. We’re going to unleash some blogs that are much more conversational and less proclamational (that’s a word now). If we deliver on this, it will hopefully feel like you’re eavesdropping on our design meetings. You won’t always learn a lot about exciting new features coming to the game, but you will (ideally) learn something about the design process itself. (When we have big, exciting news to share, or ‘State of the Game’ style blogs, we’ll still do those as well.)

But to pull off this more casual blog style, let’s establish a few ground rules:

1) No promises. I’m going to be talking about a lot of things we might do or things we could do. You shouldn’t interpret this brainstorming as patch notes. Our creative process is insanely iterative. We might pitch dozens of ideas before we find one we like. That can be really exhausting if you’re not used to it. If you’re more interested in final decisions and not idea churn, then this style of blog won’t be for you.

2) Don’t read too much between the lines. I’m going to point out a lot of design flaws in our game. “Oh no! Goatcaller admitted WoW was deeply flawed! It’s shark-jumping time!” Look, Blizzard is very critical about our own designs. There is virtually nothing in World of Warcraft that could not be improved. That has always been the case and will continue to be the case. Just because I’m going to be sharing that more frankly with you doesn’t mean that the game now has more cracks in its foundation than it ever did. There is an old saying (misattributed, from what I understand, to Otto Bismarck) that laws are like sausages; it is best not seeing them being made. My old friend and mentor Bruce Shelley used to apply the same maxim to game design.

3) No complaints about the topic. If we didn’t have an interesting discussion about a topic recently, e.g. shaman mechanics, I’m not going to invent one. That doesn’t mean that the class is perfect, or that we don’t love shaman players, or that the shaman class has no direction, or that the class design is frozen in carbonite. I’m not going to keep hash marks next to every class and spec to make sure I’ve covered their “Very Important Issues” lately in a blog. World of Warcraft design being what it is, we’ll probably eventually get around to talking about everyone on here, but it may take weeks or months or years. My team is responsible for areas of the game including classes, items, encounters, trade skills, achievements, combat, and UI, so my blogs will probably stick to those topics.

Okay, all that preamble is out of the way now. I’ll probably refer back to it sometimes, if we have some players stomping all over the ground rules.

One topic we’ve been discussing lately is the role of Hit and Expertise on tank gear (or more precisely, plate tanking gear). The conventional wisdom is that Hit and Expertise are threat stats, and you may need to swap them out with some of your mitigation stats depending on the situation. Realistically, unless you severely overgear the content, we don’t think that is actually true. Tanks almost always worry about survival first and foremost, which totally makes sense, and are willing to trade off threat stats for better mitigation in almost all situations. It’s much harder to progress if the tank explodes than it is if the cat occasionally pulls aggro. (It’s not quite that simple, but I’m going to gloss over details and exceptions since I spent so much text on the preamble up above).

Once upon a time, taunts could miss, and so Hit was marginally more interesting than it is today. Once upon a time, having a boss parry your attacks could speed up its swing timer, which turned Expertise into a (often weak) survival stat. Boss parries felt very random though, both in the sense that sometimes the tank would suddenly take much more damage than anticipated and there was no easy way to know which bosses had parry speed up. (Today, you can assume none of them do.) Until recently, interrupts could miss, but asking a tank to stack a bunch of Hit just for those few opportunities when they were probably going to hit anyway but disaster would occur if they did not felt crummy too.

The problem is that there aren’t a lot of stats that are interesting to tanks. Stamina and Armor are great, but their stat budget is often in lockstep with item level. (It would be interesting to consider if we could make that not the case once again, but that’s the topic for another blog.) We got rid of Defense as a stat that tanks needed to worry about. We have managed to make Mastery pretty good to excellent for tanks, so that’s at least one stat they like to see. Dodge and (if you’re a plate-wearer) Parry are good, and slightly interesting because of talents like Hold the Line. But beyond that, it starts to go downhill. Sure Haste and Crit can sometimes be fun, but really they often aren’t worth the trade off. That leaves us with Hit and Expertise. We’d like to make them more interesting to tanks. But how?

One way is by turning them into defensive stats. They are defensive stats for Blood death knights, because the DK self-healing is tied into Death Strike, which can miss. It might be possible to do something similar for the other classes. Imagine if Shield Block had to actually hit the target. Presumably you raise your shield, but not high enough to intercept the incoming blow. Now hit becomes a mitigation stat for warriors as well. We might have to adjust the mitigation amount on Shield Block or give warriors a small Hit bonus so Hit capping wasn’t totally unreasonable, but you get the basic idea. You could do the same with paladins (make Holy Shield more interesting?) and druids as well (Savage Defense could proc on a hit).

Is this a good idea? We’re not sure yet. You won’t see this change in the 4.1 patch for certain. There are trade-offs to making Hit and Expertise more valuable. Gearing as a tank might be more fun for experienced players, but it also might be more challenging for less experienced players. The number of struggling tanks in your Dungeon Finder groups might go up. Some less knowledgeable players (and to be fair, this stuff doesn’t exactly explain itself on the character sheet) might stack Hit way too high at the expense of a more valuable mitigation stat, such as mastery.

It is the kind of thing we’re talking about though, and if you want to make a contribution to the tanking forums but aren’t quite sure on a topic, here is one potential possibility.

-Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer of World of Warcraft. He still has Buru’s Skull Fragment.

We want to give everyone an early heads-up regarding our plan to implement a guild relocation service for World of Warcraft. The idea is for a guild leader to be able to transfer a guild to another realm. The guild structure remains intact, including the guild leader, guild bank, ranks, and guild name (depending on availability).

Guild members who decide to relocate with their guild may initiate their own paid character transfer. Upon a successful transfer they will automatically be part of the guild when they first log into the new realm. Their guild rank and guild reputation will be intact.

Guild leaders who do not want a change of scenery may also choose to pick a new guild name using another new service. These services are in development and we will be providing additional details at a future point in time.

As with all of the features and services we offer, we intend to incorporate the guild relocation service in a way that will not disrupt the game play experience. Please note that this feature will require extensive internal testing, so you may see bits and pieces of the service appear on the public test realms. We’ll announce further details at http://www.WorldofWarcraft.com.

Achievements

• A new feat of strength with an associated title, “the Camel-Hoarder”, has been added for players that have bested Dormus and obtained the Reins of the Grey Riding Camel — because there must always be a Camel-Hoarder.
• PvP
  • Rated Battlegrounds
    • The achievements to win 100 rated Battlegrounds have been renamed to “Veteran of the Alliance” and “Veteran of the Horde”, and now award those titles.
    • Achievements to win 300 rated Battlegrounds have been added, awarding the “Warbound” and “Warbringer” titles to the Alliance and Horde respectively.
  • Arathi Basin
    • The achievement “We Had It All Along *cough*” now requires the player to win Arathi Basin by 50 points or less, up from 10 points or less.
  • The Battle for Gilneas
    • The achievement “Jugger Not” now requires the player to win The Battle for Gilneas by 100 points or less, up from 10 points or less.
    • The achievement “Out of the Fog” requires the player to defend 2 bases in a single battle, down from 3.
    • The achievement “One Two Three You Don’t Know About Me” requires the player to assault 2 bases in a single battle, down from 3.
    • The achievement “Not Your Average PUG’er” now requires 10 total flag defenses, down from 50.
    • The achievement “Battle for Gilneas All-Star” now requires a single flag assault and flag defense in a battle, down from 2.

Death Knight

• Desecration no longer triggers when an applicable strike hits a snare-immune target. This is primarily to avoid unnecessary spell effect clutter during boss encounters.

Mage

• Frostbolt damage has been increased by 10%.
• Fingers of Frost bonus damage applied to Ice Lance has been increased to 25%, up from 15%.

Paladins

• Illuminated Healing shield duration is now 15 seconds, up from 8 seconds. In addition, Illuminated Healing has been increased to provide 1.5% effect per mastery, up from 1.25%.

Shaman

• Improved Fire Nova has been redesigned and replaced by a talent called Seasoned Winds. When an enemy spell cast is successfully prevented with Wind Shear, the shaman gains magical resistance (in an amount equal to what a protection totem/aura would grant, stacking with such buffs) to the spell school(s) of the interrupted spell (except for Holy spells), lasting 10 seconds.

Dungeons & Raids

• Dire Maul North
  • The Gordok Courtyard Key in Fengus’s Chest is now replenished after several seconds.
• The Mechanar
  • The Cache of the Legion now unlocks when Gatewatcher Gyro-kill is gyro-killed.
• Stratholme
  • Postboxes no longer require keys to open, because really, who locks their postboxes anymore when they’re all undead? It’s just people sending coupons for brains anyway.
  • The Postmaster now spawns when 3 of any postbox are opened.
• Uldaman
  • The Staff of Prehistoria is no longer required to open the door in the Map Room.
  • Baelog’s chest has been given new loot. If it’s grey it’s good, right?
• Zul’Farrak
  • Troll Cages no longer require the Executioner’s Key to open.

Guilds

• The amount of guild experience rewarded for rated Battleground guild group wins has been dramatically increased.
• Players are now rewarded guild experience for Honorable Kills in the field.
• Players are now rewarded guild experience for Battleground wins in Battleground brackets up to level 80.
• Arena teams are now awarded guild experience for wins. The entire team must be members of the same guild to earn this experience.

Items

• All trade goods available for purchase with Honor or Justice Points from the associated commodities vendors have had their prices reduced by 50%.
• Maelstrom Crystals are now available for purchase with Honor or Justice Points from the associated commodities vendors.

PvP

• Arenas
  • The Ring of Valor has returned! It should now be playable again in the Arena map rotation.
  • New starting areas have been added for Ring of Valor. Players will no longer enter the Arena on the elevator. It’s been removed. Instead players will start in a room at opposite ends of the Arena.

Quests & Creatures

• Loot from the creatures Garr, Julak-Doom, Mobus, and Poseidus has been adjusted to be commensurate to their rarity and invested effort.

User Interface

• The Guild Finder has been implemented! While we are continuing to add final polish to this feature.

 

Tip of the Day – <3 Them Critters!

“Did you know that WoW Vault can help you get an easy 30 achievement points? Of course we can! Check out Rill’s & Pallydog’s guides to loving those squirrels, sharing your lives, and those that cared for me.”

 

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. “

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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.”

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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.”

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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.