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.

  

Topic of the Week

The PTR does not exist solely for balance feedback. They provide crash reports, bug reports, having the patches simply live on a test environment with people actively playing helps us catch a great number of issues that no one would even need post about. Beyond that though the bug reports that are posted are extremely helpful, and overall the PTRs lead without a doubt to a more stable patch than it would have been were there no public test.

In direct answer to what you’re referring, unless there’s new content, the number of people on the PTR is really pretty low. Too low to pull reliable metrics to base balance changes on. Unless there’s new content to drive people to the PTR there generally just isn’t a sample size. Which is fine, because we can make changes after the PTR once the patch hits the live realms. Issuing hotfixes after a patch is by no means something new. We’ve used hotfixes for quite a long time, but since Cataclysm and the new community site, hotfix changes are front page news through the blogs. Which is awesome. Before we were throwing out pretty much the same amount of hotfixes we were after 4.0.6. Difference being we didn’t have a great way to tell anyone about them. So now hotfixes are very visible and it makes it seem like we’re going crazy with them, when really it’s just increased transparency into the changes we’re making.

Going back to your question, the PTR does many great things for the patches, and it should be expected that we’re not going to make balance changes based on forum posts alone. The designers don’t believe their own play experience is reason enough to make balance changes, although it can be one part of the puzzle, and the same goes for us reading about yours.

“In both normal and heroic dungeons you’ll find that some bosses are optional. In other words you don’t have to kill them to complete the instance. On the one hand, you just want to get your random done quickly so you can get your points and get on with life. On the other hand, there’s loot and more points to be had! These can be a point of contention in groups so for today’s tip, we recommend for you to take the initiative at the beginning of the instance. Ask if the group intends to do the optional bosses or not. Vote on it if you need to but make sure everyone agrees so there’s no disputing later when the group is getting tired and the instance is getting long.”

Submitted by: WoWVault

Dungeons & Raids

• Deadmines
  • Foe Reaper 5000′s health has been reduced slightly. In addition, he now enrages at 40%, up from 30%.
  • When enraged, Foe Reaper’s Molten Slag spawn 33% faster.
  • Some boat fires will now go out when Vanessa VanCleef is defeated, making it easier to get back onto the ship from the cavern entrance.
  • Vengeance of VanCleef has been redesigned. It is now a stacking buff that increases damage dealt, size, and attack speed, and stacks up to 40 times. Vanessa will begin casting this as soon as she jumps back onto the boat after detonating charges.

Classes

• Warriors
  • Drums of War no longer lowers the rage cost of Piercing Howl.
  • Mortal Strike cost has been reduced by 5 rage.

• General
  • Broiled Dragon Feast is correctly being tracked by the guild achievement, Set the Oven to “Cataclysmic”.
  • The guild achievement Lower Blackrock Spire Guild Run can now only be earned in a group of at least 4 players from the same guild in a 5-player party.
  • The achievement Sunwell Plateau Guild Run now requires a guild group to complete. This achievement can no longer be completed without the requirement of having 75% of the raid be guild members.
  • Guild experience daily resets should no longer sometimes fail to occur.
• Classes
  • Death Knights
    • Necrotic Strike is now affected by resilience.
  • Druids
    • Druids previously unable to learn Nature’s Grasp will be able to learn that spell now.
    • Rejuvenation now consumes 16% of base mana, down from 26%, but still requires 26% of base mana in order to be cast.
  • Mages
    • Rank 1 of Pyromaniac no longer improperly gives 5% passive haste.
    • The mana costs of the following mage spells have been reduced, but they still require the previous percentage of base mana in order to be cast: Arcane Barrage (11% of base mana), Arcane Blast (7% of base mana), and Fireball (12% of base mana). As an example, Fireball requires 16% base mana to cast, but only consumes 12% of base mana.
  • Priests
    • Sin and Punishment is now properly causing its terror affect when dispelled. In addition, it no longer shares diminishing returns with fear effects. It now shares diminishing returns with horrify effects.
    • Priests who were unable to learn Holy Nova will now be able to train the spell.
  • Warlocks
    • While Nightfall is active, Doomguards will not instantly cast Doom Bolt.
  • Warriors
    • A bug has been fixed where the Shield Block ability granted 25% more critical block chance than was intended for Protection warriors with very high total chance to avoid attacks.
• Dungeons & Raids
  • It should no longer be possible for players to inadvertently be locked out of killing a raid boss depending on whether or not they were online when the boss was killed.
  • The battle resurrection counter will now correctly reset if players are not inside the dungeon when an encounter resets.
  • The Bastion of Twilight
    • The hotfix on January 5 to increase the damage of Liquid Ice during phase 3 of the Ascendant Council fight has been reverted. Due to a separate bug with the size of the Elementium Monstrosity’s hitbox, it is often impossible for melee classes to avoid damage from this ability. This issue is slated to be addressed in patch 4.0.6 so that Liquid Ice damage can again be increased.
    • Many adjustments to the behavior of various mechanics in the Sinestra encounter have been made.
    • Fester Blood now hits everyone in the room instead of having a 20-yard radius on Heroic difficulty during the Cho’gall encounter. No more kiting he who has too many eyeballs.
    • Valiona’s Blackout can no longer be absorbed by Grounding Totem or reflected. Its healing absorption effect has also been increased for 10-player normal difficulty.
  • Blackwing Descent
    • Atramedes will now reset if the players targeted by Sonic Breath or Obnoxious Fiends attempt to leave the room.
    • Zoning into the dungeon after a soft reset now causes all Atramedes-related objects and creatures to reset completely. The introduction event will replay once the dwarves have been cleared. Entering combat with Atramedes forces the gongs to become usable and the fight will function normally from this point.
    • Atramedes will no longer despawn when his tail passes through the area trigger in the entrance to his room. He will no longer despawn randomly during the fight. Pulling him out of his room will now cause him to reset.
    • The damage of Chimaeron’s Caustic Slime has been reduced for both raid sizes and dungeon difficulties.
    • Chimaeron will not cast Caustic Slime on Feral tanks in Bear Form unless there aren’t enough non-tank specialized targets available. This fix applies to Magmaw’s targeting functionality as well.
    • Rip and Bane of Doom damage is no longer affected by the damage increase of Stolen Power when engaging Nefarian.
    • Abberrations spawned during the Maloriak encounter were displaying inappropriately high health values on Heroic difficulty. This has been corrected.
• Items
  • Bloodthirsty Gladiator’s Badge of Dominance and Vicious Gladiator’s Insignia of Dominance on-use effects now properly modify healing done.
  • Darkmoon Card: Volcano now triggers from periodic damage.
  • Divine Shield and Blessing of Protection no longer remove the Blind Spot debuff from the normal and Heroic versions of the Jar of Ancient Remedies. When targeting an ally at very close range (2-3 yards) when using this item, it will still energize them instead of the user. This will be fixed in an upcoming patch.
  • Free Action Potions now cannot be used above level 80.

Professions

• Archaeology keystone fragments can no longer be prospected.
• Lifebound Alchemist Stones can no longer be disenchanted.

PvP

• Arenas
  • Ring of Valor has been temporarily disabled until select bugs can be fixed in an upcoming patch.
• Battlegrounds
  • Teams who are in the rated Battleground queue and have a member disconnect are now removed from the queue after 10 minutes if the player does not come back. The team is still at the top of the queue if the player comes back and the Battleground will pop almost instantly.
  • Battleground ratings, wins, and losses should now always update after every game when playing in rated Battlegrounds. Certain conditions were not causing this to happen previously.
  • Players who do not show up to a Rated Battleground, either by leaving the queue or letting the Battleground queue time out, are not being credited for a win.
  • Players who are removed from a Battleground when it closes due to a lack of players will not receive the Deserter debuff.
  • Players are again able to queue for more than one Battleground at a time without issue.

Quests & Creatures

• Darnassus
  • Worgen character hearthstone location is now set to the Craftsmen’s Terrace in Darnassus upon completing the quest “Ruh’theran Village”.
• Deepholm
  • Fungalmancer Glop no longer grants experience and now rewards quest kill credit to all players who have damaged him.
• Tol Barad Peninsula
  • Players will receive quest credit for killing any quest boss, regardless of party status, so long as they participate in killing these bosses.
  • Problim can now be seen from a much larger distance.
  • Cell Watchers in D-Block are no longer incorrectly tagged as elite.
  • “The Leftovers”, “Swamp Bait” and “A Huge Problim” can now be shared between members of the Alliance. In addition, these quests now award the correct amount of gold and faction for the Horde and Alliance as well.
  • Darkwood Broodmothers no longer flee at 25% and periodically inflict targets with Reckless Toxin instead.
  • Hungry Ghouls and Skeletal Beastmasters now drop the Cursed Femur quest item when on the quest “Salvaging the Remains”, and the tooltip also indicates these creatures drop the quest item.
  • Restless Infantry and Restless Soldiers now spawn more quickly.
• Twilight Highlands
  • If reinforcements are not called after 60 seconds, Skullcrusher will now despawn. When reinforcements are called, Skullcrusher no longer improperly despawns.
• Uldum
  • Titanic Guardian’s Burning Gaze ability should no longer put everyone in the zone in combat.