The latest PTR build added the first gladiator mount of Wrath of the Lich King, the Deadly Gladiator's Frostwyrm. This mount will be given to the top 0.5% teams at the end of the Season 5 of the Arena.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INB_OTRZIuk
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Free respec for all classes in patch 3.1
All characters will have their talent points refunded for 3.1. That was a necessary change in order to implement the dual-spec system. That is also one of the reasons we messed around so much with the talent trees. You are unlikely to see so much tinkering for future content patches. (Source)
Skill bonuses different in PvP and PvE
We can make that distinction now. The problem, in our minds, is that at some point you're just playing two different games instead of one. WoW is already enormously complicated with all of the spells, talents, tradeskills, racials and gear you have to keep track of. We have some mechanics that work differently in PvP (typically when we can't come up with a better solution) but we view that a last resort.
Just imagine all the tooltips. PVE: This ability blah blah. PVP: This ability blah blah. Then you'd have to have a lot of talents affect things differently. Grants a 10% bonus in PvP or a 25% bonus in PvE. (Source)
Tanking - Block
We haven't announced any changes to block. In a theoretical space, I wonder if a better implementation would be a mechanic where the amount blocked was double (or triple) what it is currently, but you could never block every swing (even on large piles of weak mobs).
Tanking - Shield Block Value
I don't think we'd be likely to do away with SBV. I could see doing away with block rating. It is good for itemization to have some stats which are very defensive oriented. SBV does have some offensive potential and it does play well with Strength so it already is more versatile than say something like armor.
Getting rid of block rating would be a big change and would require us to mess with several items and talents. (Read: this is probably not in the 3.1 time frame.) Ideally though, we think there might be a place for block that is in between say the guaranteed mitigation offered by armor and the RNG mitigation offered by avoidance.
It might be tricky in that world to differentiate paladin and warrior blocking, and maybe we wouldn't need to. Traditionally, the paladin blocked every hit for a small amount and the warrior blocked fewer hits for a larger amount. In reality, I'm not sure that niche buys us much except for paladins being able to tank 10,000 adds without taking damage. (Source)
Using Patchwerk to compare DPS between classes
In our minds, Patchwerk is not the perfect fight around which dps should be balanced. It is a relatively simple fight. However consider:
1) Warriors don't get rage from taking damage on Patch. On fights where warriors get rage, their dps will go up. Which case do you balance around? (We balance around both, which is why you can't just look at the Patch numbers.)
2) Patch is a very stationary fight. Certain specs do better when the boss doesn't move. Other specs care a lot less if the boss doesn't move, provided they don't have to move as well.
3) Patch has no adds. Adds can add a lot to a fight. Even if you say "trash doesn't matter" (which we think is silly to say), there are boss fights with adds. Killing them quickly can get you back to the boss. Some classes can swap targets or do AE damage faster or more easily than others.
4) Patch is a short fight. This is probably the most important factor. If you have a cooldown you can blow once every three minutes, then that cooldown counts for a lot more on a three minute fight than a five minute fight. If your cooldown lasts for 20 sec, that counts for more the shorter the fight it. We were watching dps on Ulduar fights the other day. The amount of additional dps that a raid can kick in when they need to burn something down quickly is extraordinary, sometimes double what the raid can normally do.
We look at Patchwerk numbers. We don't balance around just those numbers. I also find it slightly suspicious that many raids can achieve the same dps (or within a few %s) night after night on the same boss. The delta is caused by things like RNG and skill. But that is a broader topic.
Furthermore, if you are downplaying skill and just assuming that every one in your raid is at the top of your game, then why did some guilds reach Illidan, Archimonde, KJ or Sarth 3D faster? You can blame it all on them being able to devote more time to the attempts if you want, but we think there is more going on. We stand by "It just isn't going to turn out that way on every parse, folks."
P.S. I also won't claim that the dps numbers are balanced where we want them in 3.0. Many of our 3.1 changes are designed to address those issues. (Source)
Pure vs. Hybrid
Our logic is actually pretty simple. If hybrid classes can do the same dps as pure classes, then why have pure classes in the game? So we design the pure classes to do slightly higher dps.
We try very hard not to define "slightly." I probably got cornered by a bunch of angry posters in a dark alley one evening and blurted out "5%!" Or maybe someone in the forums suggested 5% and it stuck.
Why don't we like to refer to very explicit numbers like 5%? Because look what happens. A fine guild like Premonition or Ensidia posts their Ulduar parses, and players jump on them and say "ZOMG that mage is below the warrior," or "ZOMG that rogue is 7% above the paladin." It just isn't going to turn out that way on every parse, folks. Encounters are very different from each other. Gear varies. Even for fantastic guilds, skill varies. Players have to deal with things like lag or whatever mods they use or just dumb luck. RNG exists in boss fights. Strings of crits for a Fire mage or strings of parries for a DK tank can change the outcome enormously.
Saying that pures should beat hybrids by 5% is like saying a penny should be tails 50% of the time. If you flip a penny infinite times, yes, it will be tails half the time. But if you flip the penny three time and don't get any tails, you shouldn't take the penny to the bank and tell them it's broken.
Our goal is to give every class reasonable raid buffs and utility. None of them should be so good that you earn a spot just because of that utility. Plenty of times, your utility isn't going to be as useful because someone else has already brought that buff. This is by design. However, if you feel your class just got boned in the buff department, that is a great thing to bring up (though probably not in this thread). We used to penalize classes who had excellent buffs. Now we try to spread the wealth of both buffs and dps a lot better.
We want you to get a spot because you know what the blank you're doing, not because your class is programmed to always do top dps or inflate raid dps through a miraculous spell that you impart by clicking a button every 30 min.
Play your class to the best of your ability. If you do so, you will be very high on the damage meters, even if you are a druid, priest, warrior, DK, shaman or paladin. You won't top it on every fight. Some fights are better for some classes than others. Some players have better luck. Over time, the trends will emerge and most raiding players will figure them out. For our part, we will keep jimmying the numbers to get the results we want. (Source)
Druid (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Healing Touch
We think Healing Touch has a sufficient role in leveling, healing 5-player dungeons (probably glyphed), or with Nature's Swiftness.
Having said that, I think it is legit that too many talents affect HT, and sometimes only HT. Long-term, that is probably something we will try and improve. If we don't do it for 3.1, it would be because we would likely have to nerf some spells in order to have the talents prop them back up and anything else that felt like Resto nerfs right now (even if they are ultimately for the good of the class as this one would be) would be pretty unpopular right now.
I don't mean to imply that we won't make unpopular changes, because clearly we do. But we try and pick our battles carefully. (Source)
Hunter (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
All pets not available on Tournament Realms
I suspect this is not a change we can make without a major patch. That is, this is not hotfixable. From 3.1 on, all of the pets are available. (Source)
Differences between pets DPS
Totally agree. We don't want 51-BM hunters to have fewer pet choices. We want the 51 BM talent to be a net dps increase as well as giving the player some prestige pets, that often have some nice little buffs or abilities. (Source)
Is there still any plans to look into buff scaling off a pet's master instead of buffs going directly to a pet? This might solve some of the issues with super scaling abilities.
We can't do that yet, but I expect that will eventually be a direction we will go. Again, the point would not be just to nerf pets, but to make sure their power didn't vary so dramatically between buffed and non-buffed. (Source)
Mage (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Molten Armor changes
The difference is Spirit is inflated a great deal by raid buffs and Crit Rating is not.
But again, the change is not necessarily to punish mages who avoided Spirit like the plague, and my apologies if my posts have suggested that. Those non-Spirit items are not super common, so to some extent they were lucky if they put those sets together. The change is to make mages not hate the Spirit that they are almost certainly going to end up with on their gear. As long as we close the gap a great deal between Spirit and non-Spirit geared mages, then the change has done its job. I think some players were just hoping we would itemize a lot of cloth gear without Spirit. That we are not going to do. We tried to be very clear that the goal was always "make Spirit work for mages" not "let mages easily avoid Spirit." (Source)
Removing some crit to replace it by Spirit
I spelled out pretty clearly that we were not going to buff mages as part of making Spirit more useful. A few sharp players even said "If you lower our base damage and then let Spirit improve it, that would be good." I acknowledged that was exactly what we were likely to do.
[...] When you say "where we were previously" do you mean with Improved Scorch or not? You have, what, 5% crit with glyphed Molten Armor? I believe it requires ~575 Spirit to get to that point. The random Naxx mages I just looked up on the Armory had 300-400 Spirit unbuffed. You can get 100 with just Divine Spirit and Mark of the Wild. That was all off the top of my head, so forgive me if some numbers are off.
As I said in the other thread though, the exact conversion is something we can mess with. One to one (Spirit to Crit) would be too generous, but we have some room.
[...] Many of these players are arguing that mages who avoid Spirit are not getting a huge drop in dps. It is also almost impossible to have no spirit from gear as a mage. (Source)
Dark Legacy #182
Dark Legacy #182 is out!
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