Recent In-Game Fixes
Quote from: Bornakk (Source)
Listed below are recent fixes we have applied to the game.
3/14/09
? Level restrictions have been applied to Lake Wintergrasp. Only players level 70 or higher can count towards the tenacity tally or obtain the tenacity buff and get credit for victory or defeat. In addition, only players level 50 or higher will be able to use the portal to Wintergrasp.
Blue posts
Quote from Blizzard staff
Raids & Dungeons - Hard Mode
Ulduar has a ton of bosses. While I'm sure some players would love for us to deliver an instance with that level of content every month or so (and throw in a 5-player run to boot!), it's not in the cards, at least not for the next couple of years.
Instead, what we tried to do with Ulduar is offer a lot of different ways to play the encounters. While the progress-oriented guilds may clear it quickly, we hope that some of the hard modes will offer them a lot to chew on. All of the players who are somewhere between barely being able to clear the instance and the "world first" crowd should be able to find a comfortable difficulty level as well.
Your old model towards end game was a success, it brought you eleven million players.
Most of whom never had a chance to finish a raid. They didn't get to see some of the best art in the game, hear the unique music or voice over, or in many cases even see the villian at the end of their quest line. From a production POV, instances are very expensive. It seems an odd choice to lavish all that attention on such a tiny percent of the player base.
At the same time, we know there are players who love a challenge and are willing to do almost anything to beat a raid-destroying boss provided they also have a shot at the best loot. They don't want the instances to be over too soon. They like banging their head against the wall.
And so hard modes were born. We tested the water a little with Obsidian Sanctum. We're going full bore with Ulduar. (Source)
Raids & Dungeon - Raid Composition
As you well know, assuming you read the thread, this was a case of a class or spec wanting a unique buff to guarantee them a raid spot. It wasn't enough to bring *a* buff. They wanted a unique buff such that their guild would say, for example, "We have to take a Retribution paladin or we'll be really behind."
In BC, you "had" to have warlocks to bring Curse of Shadows (never mind that it mostly helped the warlocks) and you had to have a 2 or more Shadow Priests as a mana battery. The list of who you had to bring was so inflexible that doubling up (and in some cases even finding room for one player) was prohibitive. Ret is actually a great example. Their dps was fine, if they were in the right group and had all of the right buffs to prop up their damage. Problem was by the time you put those other 4 characters together, the Ret was the only person benefiting from those buffs and your dps would generally be higher with a rogue in that spot instead. Since the Ret dps in the caster group would be bad, there just wasn't much reason to bring the Ret at all. (Now there are exceptions and clearly Ret paladins did get to raid some of the time, but most Sunwell-level guilds know exactly what I am talking about.)
Rather than just nerfing buffs to such a degree that you don't actually notice a power increase from being in a group, we spread all of the buffs around to multiple characters. Because there are no (or very few) unique buffs, you shouldn't have much problem finding someone to bring a necessary buff, even Replenishment, and honestly unless you are doing hard modes, you can probably do without a few of those buffs anyway. (Source)
Healers - Spirit regeneration and healing in Ulduar
That was partially because OFSR was so potent back then. Honestly, we're not trying to recreate the MC days or healer rotations, though I can understand if some of you are nostalgic for them.
In Ulduar, you should run out of mana if...1) You don't have enough gear for the instance.2) You aren't playing the encounter well enough.
If you have good enough gear and good enough skill and aren't standing in fires and are kiting adds correctly and doing all the right things, then you aren't designed to run OOM.
The reason we wanted to nerf regen is that having infinite mana was allowing too much of a buffer on those two factors (it allowed for too much "slop" in organization and execution). Take Saphiron as an example. When mana regen is very high, the dps can sit in the blizzards for a little while because the healers can just heal through it and make up enough mana when they get a clearcasting proc or are running for ice blocks (because OFSR regen was so good). In previous tiers of content, the guild probably would have had to farm the earlier bosses for several weeks to get enough gear to have a chance at the final few.
Now Naxx was designed to be easy, and Ulduar isn't going to be a lot harder. Hard modes on the bosses though are designed to be very hard. That means being inefficient with mana has to be a liability instead of a tool used to make the content less challenging. (Source)
Death Knight (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Death Knights are too good
Death Knights are too good in 3.0.9. We think they are in a better place in 3.1. (Source)
Tanking with different specs
Our intent is not to force DKs down one tanking tree any more than they were before. It's cool that Frost tanking is getting more attention, but I think the jury is still out on whether one build is so much better than another one that players feel that they have no options. We'll give the community a chance to chew on all of the changes (more are coming, though mostly for dps DKs) and see if our opinion changes.
Since Unholy slightly emphasizes avoidance, Frost slightly emphasizes armor and Blood slightly emphasizes health, it's also likely that some builds will be more useful on some encounters compared to others. That isn't necessarily what we're going for, but it's a likely outcome, and again as long as the delta isn't too huge, it should work out fine. (Source)
Scent of Blood
Some DKs felt like they were runic power starved for Rune Strike and other abilities while tanking. Others said it was their avoidance that was the problem and still others have no problem maintaining threat at all.
If you need runic power, Scent of Blood is for you. I wouldn't consider it nearly as mandatory as something like Anticipation for a tanking build. But we'll see what the community ends up doing.
I have tanked in the game a lot, and I have found cookie cutter builds to be less mandatory than the forums and articles often suggest. Certain *talents* are mandatory, but you nearly always have a few extra points to get what you want, depending a great deal on your gear and the group you run with. If you have great healers and never die, then you probably don't need as much survivability. If you have amazing and impatient dps, then you might want to emphasize threat more. Again personal experience here, but I have also found many tanks to be more reluctant to swap out gear per encounter than they should. Good tanks often swap out their rings, trinkets etc. from fight to fight. Again, just throwing that out there since I know the DK class attracted some players to tanking that have never tanked before. Your mileage may vary.
Regardless, the talent was pretty lackluster with its current numbers. We nerfed it back in beta when DKs had so much rp while leveling that they just spammed Death Coil. Enough has changed that that may no longer be a problem, and DK leveling is pretty easy regardless. (Source)
Druid (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Changes to Savage Defense in 3.1
Actually, a big part of the change was because druids pointed out, correctly, that getting better gear wasn't as fun for them as other tanks because so few stats were relevant to their tanking, coupled with the fact that we don't itemize strict druid tanking gear. Getting more parity among tanking classes was a bonus in this case, because we probably could have done that in other ways. (Source)
Mage (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Spirit on mage gear
Mage gear has a lot of Spirit on it that doesn't help them much at the moment. We want to improve that. We are not going to turn mages into a class that stacks Spirit at the expense of all else, and we're not going to let Spirit provide "free" dps to mages that elevates them above the average dps of warlocks -- unless they are far below warlocks now, which does not seem to be the case. If you think it *is* the case, please provide some data or math so we know where you're coming from. (Source)
Glyph of Mirror Image in 3.1
The Winter's Chill effect being applied to Mirror Image is supposed to be just a little extra bonus. I wouldn't at all depend on it to keep that crit bonus up. I don't know how you could. [...] The Mirror Image glyph is currently at 1% with a max stack of 5 per target but you get 3 mages and they spam a lot of Frostbolts, so probably you will get a 5% buff on top of the 5% you may already have as as mage.
But with Mirror Image's cooldown, you're probably not going to have this buff up very often unless you really stack mages. It's not intended to be a new unique raid buff, just a little bonus to casting Mirror Image. (Source)
Improved Scorch nerf
The buff was just too potent to be something that offered benefits to the entire group. We want you to be more powerful in a group, but we are trying to rein in buffs that are so powerful that you feel like you have to cancel your run if you don't have them.
Even though we chilled out the magnitude of some of the buffs and debuffs, once groups started gearing up, things like dps and mana regen just went through the roof, largely because of these shared benefits. We'll make sure Fire dps is still where it needs to be even with this change. (Source)
You feel like a static 10 percent to crit is too much for the duration of the entire fight, but not if we get lucky and have our MI apply it for ~30 seconds if they manage to live?
Well, sure. 10% all of the time > 5% some of the time. I don't foresee groups stacking mages with the Mirror Image glyph so they can keep it up 100% of the time like some kind of Bloodlust rotation, but we'll see.
As I said in a related thread, it's possible the CoE debuff is too good as well. If you are choosing between player A and B for your tenth spot, we'd much rather you base that decision on who is the better player, not who brings the better buff. (Source)
Paladin (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Paladin Changes
We think Protection needs Spiritual Attunement for obvious reasons, so we are making it a deep Prot talent.
We don't actually like Holy and Ret having SA. It makes their mana regen depend too much on the encounter specifics. On fights like Patchwerk, they have no mana from SA. On dragon fights, they have a ton. That makes it hard to tune on our end because they are either starved in the first case or drowning in the second case.
We want to tune Holy through Illumination and Ret through Judgements of the Wise and let Prot use SA. All 3 can Divine Plea, but Prot can do it more often. (Source)
Spiritual Attunement
Spiritual Attunement is a great mechanic for a tanking paladin who needs the mana and gets it from taking damage. For other paladins it just complicates balance. On Patchwerk you get no mana from it as Holy / Ret and on Sartharion it gives you just a ton of mana. So you're either bone dry on one fight or drowning in mana on another, totally depending on raid damage.
The best knob we have for tweaking Ret mana return is to up Judgements of the Wise from 15% to 20% or whatever it needs to be. (Holy has Illumination.)
GC... you do realize that everyone in the paladin community is taking this as a promise you will buff jotw, right?
Such is my lot in life. We need to get some numbers for Ret mana after all of these changes and make a call at that time. I was just pointing out that we have plenty of knobs to tweak to balance the class without SA.Remember, the goal here is not to nerf Ret mana. It is to make it more stable instead of varying wildly depending on the encounter. While encounters will always be different to some extent, when you look at the mana provided by SA on different fights, it can be pretty extreme. Ulduar balance is going to be tricky because we want the normal encounters to still be accesible to most raiders while the hard modes need to be balanced on a knife's edge. Having so much variation is just going to get in the way of that.
The Seal of Blood glyph will most likely have to be changed to accomodate this change. (Source)
Rogue (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Rogues in PvP
We think it is closest to point 4. We like where rogues are in PvP in terms of damage and utility, but other classes are doing too well. (Source)
Warlock (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Doomguard changes and Affliction DPS balancing
If you mean do we forget that players have the Doomguard out on some fights, no we don't do that. We don't say "Yep looks like warlock dps is perfect" only to have someone else say "Dude, he had the DG out then!"
This may seem obvious, but it must not be because after we announce a nerf, you'll always see a slew of posts that crop up. "Dude, did you forget we do bonus damage against cats?" (Now, there are bugs sometimes that artificially inflate dps numbers. Deep Wounds and poisons are two recent examples.)
We do balance classes around the fact that they sometimes have abilities on a long cooldown. They are still abilities and you do use them. If it's a 10% dps increase that is up 10% of the time, then gratz, you have a 1% dps increase from that ability.
Similarly, we don't just balance around one type of fight with one type of gear and one set of raid buffs. There isn't just a magic number that everyone is supposed to hit. (Source)
Curse of Elements too powerful?
It could be that the CoE debuff is too powerful too. Crit however tends to have synergistic effects moreso than just +damage because it keys into a lot of class abilities that proc from crits.
If anything, we might have to chill out the "I need more utility" stuff even more. As long as players are expecting raid slots because of their amazing utility then utility is probably still too amazing. You should get raid slots because you know what the blank you are doing, not because your buff is the awesome. (Source)
Warrior (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Unrelenting Assault in 3.1 and Shattering Throw
This was basically where we were coming from. It sounds powerful, until you compare it to Pummel which stops all casting from that school and is off the GCD. Priests and druids have some instant heals which can work around the threat of the Overpower. Getting the bleeds off can also help.
As with Shattering Throw, this is a new mechanic and we're going to have to monitor it closely to see how things develop. If the duration is too long or internal cooldown too short, that's the kind of thing we can adjust in a hotfix. Similarly, we can always buff as needed. (Source)
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