Curse

Warlock - Corruption and Immolate

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

The coefficients of these spells were hotfixed last Thursday I believe.

Corruption's coefficient went from 0.156 to 0.20.
Immolate's coefficient went from 0.13 to 0.20.

This ends up being a reasonably significant dps buff to all 3 specs. In our preliminary testing, Demonology may have benefited the most.

Please recognize the changes these numbers will have on your class when making subsequent posts.

US - Free Character Moves Update (10/28 to 11/4)

Quote from: Bornakk (Source)

Update: The following set of Free Character Moves realms have been taken down ahead of time due to transfer goals being met. We will continue to watch all of the realms and make further transfers available as needed.

Source B (PvE): Zul'jin, Area 52, Medivh, Thrall, Doomhammer

Destination B (PvE): Terokkar 

Blue Posts

Class changes in WotLK
I do think you will see classes adjusted more frequently than occured in the past. There will be a lot of tweaking shortly after LK ships, but still substantial changes even beyond that. Some will be us responding to the state of the game and some will just be new things we want to try or new solutions to old problems or just things we can finally get around to taking a look at. (src)

Should 200% spell crits be baseline for most classes?
We don't think 200% spell crits need to be baseline for most classes. They make some really good talents and if we pulled those away, you might be left with less interesting talents to choose.

We do think it's a problem that some specs don't have access to those talents though. (src)

CC & Movement impairing effect pvp duration down to 10 seconds
We made a pass to get all of the CC or movement impairing effects down to the standard 10 sec duration in PvP. There are still a few exceptions. Sorry I didn't pre-announce that one. I don't always know when something is going out the door. (src)

About patch 3.0.3 release date
The plan is to release 3.0.3 before Lich King goes live. I think you can imagine the problems we'd have if that didn't happen. It's possible there will be some kind of last minute mega bug that stops us in our tracks, but I don't know of one at the moment. (src)

Arcane mages and Balance druids being watched
Arcane mages and Balance druids are definitely something we're keeping an eye on. We might need to hotfix either or both or we might not. I have no announcements about either at this time. But if they are overpowered at all, it is nowhere near the level at which Ret paladins were. (src)

Zombie event - any hints/ideas when we can expect to see the next phase?
No hints at anything. The cure for the plague has been found, we'll see what happens next. (src)

Currency items storage
We wanted to evaluate the new feature before we converted everything over. Consider, for example, that there is no way to ever delete currency. Once those items go in, they are going to be there forever, even if you consider them irrelevant junk. Now we could choose to add a means to delete currency -- that's what I mean by evaluating the feature. (src)

Will Blizzard make another instance as hard as Sunwell?
I think it's too early to say. We just haven't gotten to that content yet. Everything that follows beyond this point is just my random brain dumping and not our official stance:

-- Raiding is easy at the moment. Even Naxx will be pretty easy. Part of that is because we thought Karazhan, Gruul and Magtheridon were too steep a jump in difficulty from the heroics. Part of that is because most of the Naxx encounters are well-understood.
-- You will not be able to AE tank and AE burn down every encounter in Lich King like we're all doing now in Hyjal and Sunwell.
-- Very few players experienced Sunwell pre-nerf.
-- On the other hand, those that did were generally very complimentary of the encounters. Despite the difficulty, people had fun.
-- No matter how difficult we make content, very hardcore groups will probably still finish it quickly. In other words, we can't make "insanely difficult" the barrier that keeps a boss alive for months.
-- It's probably okay if some content is only seen by a few players. It just amps up the epic quotient of those fights. Everyone knew who Ragnaros was, even if they hadn't been able to beat him.
-- Obviously the preceeding is a very slippery slope and it's easy to make content too difficult or too easy.
-- Part of the reason Sunwell was difficult was it mandated raid stacking. The buff / debuff system has changed so much that we don't anticipate that happening again the same way.
-- We really like optional objectives that let skilled groups really test their mettle (and then show off about it). I'm talking about things like the 45-min Baron run, ZA bear run, and Chamber of the Aspects with all drakes up. Does this mean Arthas will be doable by many groups but the uber mode to beat him will be 10x as hard and offer better loot? We're just not there yet. (src)

Mortal Strike debuff
The Mortal Strike debuff is a tricky one. We do realize how potent it is in Arenas and we have used it on occasion to give classes or specs a good role in Arenas. But then recently we stopped and asked ourself where we were going with MS. If Ret and Enhancement and Feral and whoever ends up with MS, what's the point really? Shouldn't we just start you in Arenas with healing at 50% and be done with it? This is a topic we're thinking a lot about. (src)

Class changes & Dev decision making
We do very extensive testing on all aspects of combat balance. Remember, as a large company we have access to testing capabilities far beyond that of the average player. As developers of the game, we also have access to a large number of tools that we don't make public.

I mention Patchwerk a lot because raiders understand that he is a fight where most of the raid takes no damage and there are no adds or movement issues. It is a very straight-forward fight. "Patchwerk" is shorthand for a tank and spank fight. But he is not a test case for every possible encounter in the game, nor do we use him as such.

The designers are generally very good at playing a variety of classes. You pretty much have to be to get hired here. We also spend a lot more time with the game than many players are capable of doing, and can look up numbers or gather data that most players have to estimate or guess at. All of this experience probably puts us in the upper percentiles of player skill. Nevertheless, we don't pretend to be the best players in the world in all aspects of WoW, nor do I think that is necessary to do our jobs. We do employ experts on all classes in both PvE and PvP and as a reality check to our own testing, we are also in contact with expert players of the classes throughout the world. We also read this forum and others just to make sure players are experiencing the same thing we're seeing.

I think sometimes there is a misperception from players that we read the forums all day and when we see someone saying "X is too good" we nerf it and when "Y is too bad" we buff it. Forum feedback, while very helpful, is but a small percentage of our actual testing paradigm. (So is personal experience of that matter.)

We do make mistakes sometimes, whether because of an undetected bug, or players falling into different spell rotations or gear that we predict, or a number of other reasons. But you generally don't need to worry that e.g. we forgot to test say paladins on non-undead targets. (src)

WotLK Itemization
There are still pieces which are more appropriate for one class or spec than another. Some of the changes we made, such as spell power, will blur the lines slightly more. Our goal with that was more to help say an undergeared paladin get healing gear or an undergeared warlock be able to benefit from the "healing" cloth rather than just sharding it.

I've played a priest enough (I've played every class) to know that it can be frustrating when a paladin wants to roll on a piece of cloth, but most of the time the raid leaders I have run with tend to let the cloth-wearers get first dibs. I agree that there is a big social aspect to loot distribution. To some extent, that is by design. (src)

Druid
Developer Q/A (src)
1) Some feral tanking concerns regarding gear are valid. While there are pieces of tanking gear out there that have our needs tailored into them, the vast majority of tanking filler pieces cater to the other 3 tanking classes. Is there anything being done about this?
We are talking long and hard about Feral tank itemization right now. As I mentioned on the beta forums, we may end up pulling bonus armor altogether.

2) Nurturing Instinct is a talent that still increases healing done by agility. I am sure several druids out there agree that this is not in-sync with Blizzard's shift to Spell Power. Is anything being done about this?
There are still talents that affect just healing and not damage. It is consistent with that philosophy.

3) Feral Survivability in PvP got hurt a lot. I have heard that there are things in the works to try and fix this. Can you confirm whether this is being looked at?
We have not come to the conclusion that Ferals have become significantly more squishy than anyone else. We believe ALL classes are a little squishy at 70 and the new talents might even continue the trend at 80 (which is one reason we buffed resilience).

4) Typhoon is a spell that is a main tool in PvP; but several druids feel that it is lacking. Is there any way to consider a 3 second daze or lengthening the distance of the knockback?
When I last researched this spell, it tossed players more slowly than mobs, which made it not actually get opponents as far away as we intended.

5) Typhoon and Force of Nature: Why two 41pt talents? Seems a little controversial to me. Poor protection paladins can get a single 11 pointer but here we stand with two 41 pointers? Can one of these become trained?
There are inconsistencies like this throughout the trees. It's not a hard and fast rule that the 11, 21, 31, 41 and 51 talents are clickies. We bumped Typhoon up because it felt very PvP oriented to be the bottom talent, yet it filled a niche that we thought was lacking for Balance.

6) Base damage was increased on Starfire and Wrath, and numbers have changed in PvE DPS; but as we all know, increasing the base numbers doesn't necessarily increase your DPS on the long run. At tier 7, Balance druids compete fairly well, but I am looking more into tier 8/9: Do they still compete?
From our tests, yes. They scale very well with better gear, in part because they receive extra benefits from Int and Spirit.

7) Restoration druids have had their HPS slightly nerfed from Lifebloom (their main arsenal). I understand that you want to give more diverse tools to handle different situation, but I am sure that everyone agrees that each healer has a "staple" role. The nerf, I understand, came mainly due to PvP implications, is there any way to bump this spell a bit though?
The assumption was that it came for PvP reasons, but we also knew that the "right" way to heal PvE as Resto was to keep rolling LBs on 2-3 players at the expense of almost anything else. As I've said before, it was the answer to any healing problem a druid got into. Resto has a huge repetoire of heals now, and we still think LB will be a big part of that.

8) Survival Instincts is a great spell that we needed. It (along with Barkskin and thank you for it) gave us much needed buttons to press in stressful situations, but I must be greedy: why did we get an exact copy of the warrior’s 11 point talent? Couldn’t there have been a strong regenerative talent or something that play’s to nature’s theme in this stead?
Honestly, it's because many Ferals at the time felt like they couldn't compete without that ability (and many are still asking for Shield Wall). It's a delicate balance, and honestly our prediliction is usually to err on the side of making classes more different. Yet witness the uproar over Protector of the Pack just because it comes with a nuisance-level drawback that warriors don't have (that latter point tends to be the sticky part).

The one different thing about Survival Instinct is it is also really useful for cat-focused Ferals, while Last Stand tends to be used by tanks only. We let Survivial Instinct be used by cats for that reason.

Hunter
Disengage mechanics
There is a limitation to Disengage in which a hunter who is already snared leaps as if snared. That issue will require new tech to fix it, but when we get it, we can solve that problem. We are also getting new tech to make Disengage work better on uneven ground.

The last time I used Disengage, I didn't have to aim at all. You just leap backwards, much like the way a mage Blinks. If you want to control where you land, you can rotate in place. But we thought actually requiring you to click where you wanted to go would make the ability too hard to use when you're supposed to use it -- to retreat. (src)

Hunters in Arena
I acknowledge that hunters struggled in the previous Arena seasons. I think it's vastly premature to say the situation is worse now when so few players have even been able to try Arenas at 80. We changed the hunter class quite a bit and we changed all of the other classes you were fighting as well. We don't feel particularly confident predicting what is going to happen in the next arena season, so I'm going to take with a grain of salt anyone who can sort of cleverly intuit what the state of PvP balance will be in LK.

Will we have specs that are too dominant and others that aren't viable? Probably, and we'll work to get both of those cases addressed. Are hunters in either of those camps? We'll all know soon enough. (src)

Mage
Arcane talents & pushback system
I think some of these talents (i.e Arcane Stability) probably need to be tweaked with the new pushback system in place (assuming that we like the way it plays out). (src)

Arcane concerns
We think we know how to adjust Arcane to make their rotations work better in PvE (which will also help the PvP burst at the same time). It involves changing a couple of spells though so it will take some time and isn't the kind of thing easily hotfixed (as it will make tooltips incorrect).

We don't think Arcane is so broken that it's useless to take raiding. We just want to make the rotations a little smoother and perhaps bring up PvE damage a little bit. (src)

We are very concerned about the burst damage of Arcane in PvP. If we end up nerfing Arcane Barrage in particular, nobody should be surprised.

We understand that it is fun to have an instant spell that does so much damage, even on a cooldown. But we also think Arcane is a bit of a one-trick pony at the moment -- run around and Fireball or whatever, then Barrage when it's on cooldown. A more interesting and balanced rotation would be something like getting an Arcane Blast out first, which then buffs Barrage up to its current big numbers.

In PvE, Arcane doesn't seem to be OP and might even be low compared to Frost and Fire. Buffing Arcane Blast might help in this situation too. (src)

Paladin
Holy & Protection DPS
We are concerned that Holy and Protection may have lost too much dps as "collateral damage" from the Ret nerfs. It is something we're working on now, though I do believe Holy dps is still a lot better than it was in BC. Healers will always level more slowly than dps specs since using your abilities may keep you alive but doesn't always kill stuff faster. (src)

About the missing 11-point Prot talent
We're not sure if we're going to do this or not. If we do it (make an 11-point Prot talent that is attractive to Ret) it would be for these reasons:

-- It would be cooler if the talent was something fun for Prot and not something they "need" to tank.
-- In our experience, Ret paladins who PvP often go down into Prot anyway to get Imp Hammer of Justice.
-- I suggested we might offer Ret more PvP utility since we are stripping some of the burst damage, so PvE Retadins might not want this ability anyway.
-- We wouldn't want this talent to be something Prot would never get and Ret would always get. If anything we need to err on the side of something Prot definitely wants. (src)

About the recent changes
We lowered Seal and Judgement damage, changed Divine Storm (earlier) and changed Hammer of Wrath. Those all should have lowered PvP burst damage, and they did.

The JotW nerf was done because a paladin could use all their buttons quickly then go on to another opponent with no down time. On bosses in PvE, they could hit every button that was up and still have mana left to be very high on healing meters. So we do think the mana regen was too generous in both PvP and PvE cases. (src)

Developer Q/A & Retribution tree (src)
So my question to you would be, has it been discussed between the developers about our mana regeneration, and if it would be at all possible to have it scale?
It's not clear to me why your mana needs to scale. Your spells don't keep increasing their cost as your gear increases, and in fact your damage does increase as your gear improves. Caster mana increases with gear, but whatever item budget they are spending on Int, you get to spend on other stats, such as Strength.

As I've said though, we do think we will change mana drains to a percent so that they aren't strictly more effective against classes with smaller mana pools.

I know you've been busy reading, but has something like this been considered? I'm sure you realize how we feel about Divine Storm being more or less just like a warriors whirlwind and why we are petitioning for this to go back to holy damage.
If Divine Storm went back to Holy, its damage would have to drop by a lot to compensate (maybe 40% or so). There are some design advantages to having it stay physical. For example, an Arena team can send a plate wearer to fight the Ret pally since Divine Storm will do less damage to that person.

Ultimately, we would like to have the spell feel more different from Whirlwind, but understand that our first priority was just to get paladin damage under control.

My final question and then i'll let you get back to working on the class, has to do with Righteous Vengence.
You're going to have to explain a little more what you mean about it being resisted often and doubly affected by resilience. Maybe someone else explains it in this forum and I'll see it soon. When crits are prevented from resilience, they typically do not prevent secondary effects that would have been a result of that crit. It's physical damage IIRC, so it shouldn't be resisted or dispelled at all, but I'll look into that. Ultimately though we wanted this talent mostly for PvE utility, so you shouldn't expect us to buff it a lot for PvP purposes.

51 Pointers are broadly situational. I don't think it's totally fair to expect something other out of Divine Storm.
This is true, and Divine Storm is less situational than a lot of the 51 point talents.

41pt better than 51pt...what?
We don't inflate the value of deeper talents. If the bottom talents were always the best there would never be any reason to take less than 51 points in a tree.

The core rotation should be sustainable without requiring the use of JoW. JoW should be for mana regen above and beyond that core rotation. It's bad enough in PvP that judgements don't return mana when they are absorbed. Now we essentially have to use JoW in PvP because of that limitation to JotW which means we're no longer choosing between extra mana or stopping a runner: we're choosing between necessary mana to function and stopping a runner.
I really don't see a lot of paladins judging Wisdom in PvP. Unless you are being mana drained a ton (which as I mentioned is something we do plan on fixing) I don't understand how you can be going out of mana while fighting someone. Now if you blow a lot of mana, you may have to pause in between fights. Most mana-using classes have to do that.

There is still a lot of debate on these forums about how long a paladin can go before running on fumes. So far a lot of players are finding results similar to ours, and I think some (though not all) who do claim to have trouble are being disingenous in hopes of getting it buffed. But we'll keep watching to see what happens. If we reach the point where Ret paladins are just getting slaughtered in PvP then we'll know we went way too far. I don't see that happening yet though.

Developer Q/A about Holy Paladins (src)
Aura Mastery - This needs to be removed and made baseline, Holy paladins need a new 11 point talent.
A little bit of explanation wouldn't hurt when you make claims like this. Typically we don't like to turn good talents into baseline abilities. That either leaves you with mediocre talents or the next tier of good talents (that you ask to be turned into core abilities).

Illumination - Needs a buff, mana return back to 100%? At least 75%
There was a time not too long ago where Holy paladins just didn't run out of mana. This was not good for the game.

Holy paladins are still locked down to easy in pvp and bring nothing special to aid the group, whats being done to fix this?
This is a little vague for me to be able to address your concerns. I do think there may be something to the issue that Arena teams want a healer with some offensive capabilities as well, even if that means Mass Dispel.

We are close to no longer being the best single target healer. Other classes are catching up and paladins are being removed from raids.
I haven't seen any evidence that paladins are being removed from raids in LK. In BC, that started to happen because healers needed to move a lot and raids required a ton of AE heals which didn't play into paladin strengths. We chilled down those elements as well as giving paladins more tools for those situations (such as Infusion of Light and Beacon of Light).

Beacon of Light - Is horrible in its current state, at least lower the mana cost, make it work on overhealing, and make it last longer.
I have seen an awful lot of paladins who really like Beacon. Since you sound like someone who is active in the community, I would imagine you know this, so it surprises me you would state that Beacon is horrible as if it were an accepted fact. You're at least going to have to offer some more evidence.

Judgements of the Pure - Worst 5 point talent ever made. Its so deep in the holy tree and all it dose is give 15% haste? Not worth it at all.
Before we buffed Pure, I think it was underpowered. We hesitated because we saw some player calculations that it could have been decent even in its own form. Now in its new form, we feel like it is pretty potent. If it has a disadvantage, it's that it might invalidate some of the earlier Holy talents.

Judgeing in combat isnt fun. Its very annoying, mobs are taken down way to fast to even bother, this would only work on bosses.
Part of the reason we did this was because a complaint we heard from Holy paladins was they wanted more buttons to push than just FoL and HL. Judging seemed like a natural fit since it was already part of the paladin repetoire. This perplexes me a little since you then ask for new healing spells down below. Perhaps you or someone else could elaborate? (Having 40 yard ranged Judgements is pretty nice too.)

Holy Guidance - Every other tree has a similar talent but theres is 3 points, gives more spell power AND has a secondary effeft!! Why do Holy paladins have such a horible version!
It's difficult to just directly compare talents between two different classes or specs. We can take a look at this one in particular though.

No new healing spells? ok in BC i could settle for no new spells but now in wrath its just plain stupid.
Sorry, we disagree. We don't want to just keep adding new rotational spells every expansion or classes are going to end up with just too many buttons -- some specs are dangerously close to that already. Instead we added some more situational heals. The paladin has been designed around Flash of Light, just like the shaman was designed around Chain Heal. We didn't want to completely change what these classes were all about, in part because a lot of players like them as they are. We figured players who gravitate towards wanting lots of different kinds of heals can play the druid or priest. Players who want to have relatively few spells and can then focus on cooldowns, trinkets or the like can play the paladin or shaman. We think it would be dangerous for paladins to pick up Lich King and find their class had completely changed.

Priest
Mindflay
We'll look into it. I don't have the bug list right in front of me at the moment. (src)

Just an update:
We rebuilt Mind Flay to make it work under the new system. It's now much more like Arcane Missiles, so the possibility does exist you can clip some of the ticks. It's possible for us to rebuild the spell again, but that will mean changing a lot of talents (which introduces the possibility of bugs) so we need to make sure this is absolutely necessary first.

Can anyone else comment on Misery falling off? It could get overwritten by Improved Faerie Fire and if you're playing with a sloppy Moonkin, it's possible they put the debuff up and then let it fall off. (src)

Mind Flay also get canceled when the target uses a PvP trinket (or when druids shape shift, or various other abilities that remove snares), even when we have the glyph of mind flay. I know this is because of the snare effect, but with the glyph, there is no snare, so the spell should not be canceled, right?
The problem in this case is that the glyph did not remove the snare -- it just set the effect to zero. So the trinket etc. still could cancel the spell. Because there is no easy way to have the glyph remove the snare component entirely, we recently made a change so that the glyph instead lowers the snare to a very small percent. (src)

Shadow priest design
The Shadow priest design in BC was a cool one, and by and large it worked. We feared though that we were reaching a point where having multiple Shadows was going to be mandatory for any large raid. Having multiples of one spec (of a class that was probably already going to be over-represented because of its healing potential) risked pushing some of the other historically under-represented specs( Survival hunters, Ret paladins, Balance druids, even Disc priests) out of the raid. (src)

Developer Q/A (src)
1) Dispersion. Some call this the 'self cyclone.' In other ways it's very similar to a mage's Ice Block.
We've gone back and forth on Dispersion. At times in beta it was overpowered and we backed off of it. We do think casting out of it would be too powerful. It's supposed to be a defensive ability, not something you do to keep someone from being able to counter you when you're wailing on them.

2) Being Dispelled... Dispelling resistance.
We are working on a redesign of the whole dispel system. This is a big topic, but to be brief:
1) It adds a lot of randomness to who wins or loses a battle, just based on whether the dispel worked.
2) Some classes were designed with powerful self buffs. It's hard to balance those when they are often immediately gone.
3) The whole strategy of junk buffs feels lame to both sides, but it's effective so players feel like they must do it.
4) Defensive dispelling (getting a debuff off of you) feels more legitimate than removing someone else's Fort or whatever. We want to try and steer the system towards that.
5) We need to be more consistent with dispel resistance among classes.

4) Hymn of Hope is useless in Shadowform...
We have some plans for hymns. More when we have the details worked out a little more.

5) Dropping shadowform to heal. Again, there is a severe mana penalty when we are forced to heal. All our healing casts cost a lot more plus we take on added damage and do less damage. While I'm fine with this increase/decrease aspect, I think the mana cost of switching forms needs to be removed entirely.
I don't think we'd remove it entirely, but we can look at how much it really ends up costing. There should be a decision involved with going in and out of forms, but we're re-evaluating what that is right now. Druids have a similar problem.

6) No real burst damage...
In PvP, Priests really don't base their overall damage around critting. Our current gear doesn't reflect spell critical strike...
As for Penance, I really like this spell. However, we cannot self-cast and it's also currently target-faced bugged.
We made a recent change to allow Shadowform to do more with crits. I believe the target-facing bug on Penance was also fixed. Preventing self-casting is by design.

7) Current Vampiric Touch is useless. You reduced the mana regeneration so raids are less reliant on Shadow Priests in order to run instance.
Um, Vampiric Touch does a lot of damage. It's coefficient was doubled and is now almost overpowered. When we noticed Shadow's damage was a little low, we gave a lot of it back just through VT. As far as Replenishment goes, I explained why we tied it into Mindblast elsewhere. It has to do with the cooldown - duration of the spells involved as well as not wanting to lose ticks.

9) Fade/Improved Shadowform does not match up with the tooltip. 2/2 Improved Shadowform states that it will have 100% chance to 'remove all movement impairing effects.' It doesn't remove Cyclones...
There aren't many things that remove Cyclones, but we'll look into how the bonus to Fade is implemented.

10) Overall Survivability. It's really lackluster.
Do you mean priests in general or specifically Shadow priests are squishy? We do think everyone feels a little squishy at 70. Players understandably got the new talents that enchance damage without getting the corresponding survival oriented ones that they will probably pick up in the next 10 levels. In addition, health just grows faster than damage on the way to 80. Compare PvP gear and you can see that it gains defensive stats a lot faster than offensive ones.

One reason why pre-3.0.2 that warlocks were more successful is that you could live over time through their dots and fears but their armor/survivability was high so they weren't focused as much. Basically they were a persistent CC nuisance.
Warlocks were designed to have high dps while Shadow priests were designed to have much lower dps. They were a utility class that paid in dps in order to justify their amazing group benefits. With the buff overhaul, we improved Shadow's dps significantly. (We also dropped lock survivability in PvP too.)

Rogue
Is cloak of shadow broken?
Whenever we have seen a problem like this in Cloak, it is usually because the CoS is used after the target spell is cast but before it lands. Because of the way the Internet itself is built, split-second timing like this is very subject to latency problems. Even if you think you hit the button in time, the Internet disagrees with you.

We'll take a look at Cloak of Shadows though and make sure it isn't being affected incorrectly by diminishing returns though. (src)

Developer Q/A (src)
With the reworking of “tanking” stats the rogue ability to dodge as a primary form of melee damage reduction has been significantly reduced to levels which impair their survivability in PvP, it is feared.
What is Blizzard’s position, and possible compensation for the reduction in the rogues ability to dodge?
You could be refering to one of two things -- the higher dodge ratings required, in which case you'll eventually catch up with good gear, or the diminishing returns at very high avoidance rating, but in those cases they are just diminishing returns. Your dodge does still increase.

We're not too worried about rogue survival in PvP at the current time. Rogues still have plenty of tricks. We do think PvP is a little bursty overall at level 70, but the recent change in resilience and the higher health pools at level 80 should help that.

With the removal of the snare negating effect on shadowstep, there are concerns about the mobility of rogues in a PvP environment where utility is just as important as damage. At the very least many players feel obligated to try and acquire the improved sprint talent lest waste cooldowns normally reserved for other aspects of combat, e.g. Cloak of shadows to break frost nova.
With the emphasis and ability of many classes to snare, hamstring, slow, and chill with little to no cooldown increasing, how do the developers plan to compensate in the mobility of melee classes, especially when our mobility is specifically being reduced and the prevalence of snares is increasing?
Again, your question is all about compensation. We don't know that any is needed. Rogues were a very good PvP class in BC and Cloak was either overpowered or bordering on overpowered for a lot of that time.

We understand that play style of a class may change, and change is scary for us all. Hemorrhage has been a main attack for almost four year and we understand it is to be considered a debuff attack in the upcoming expansion. It has been the general consensus that the debuff is rather insignificant to be a dedicated supportive roll in the realm of PvP combat.
What do the developers think about the debuff and damage provided by the hemorrhage ability with respect to PvP combat? Are there any plans to either increase the debuff to resemble those available to other classes or uphold and restore the ability’s role as a primary attack within the configuration of certain builds?
As a debuff, it can still account for a lot of damage. Usually when rogues complain about it, it's because it isn't boosting their personal damage enough (because other players are using all the charges). On that last part, players may use it as a primary attack, but that doesn't mean we designed it to be.

Finally, as will all new programs and games there are bugs to work out, and the rogue community is fairly adamant about issues with the proper function of stealth and vanish.
Are the programmers and developers aware of any particular bugs or problems with the workings of stealth and vanish and is so are steps being taken, as I imagine they would be, to rectify the situation?
One could write several volumes on the epic adventures of Vanish. :) Here is how I think the story goes: Players were convinced for a long time that there were bugs with Vanish. We finally got a few good cases where we could repro the problem and those were fixed (say sometime post-Sunwell). There may still be some edge cases where it still happens. I believe those are more rare, but some players are so used to the concept of Vanish being bugged that they assume nothing has ever changed. It's one of those jokes that has become larger than life (almost like Ony deep breathing more).

There were some more recent legitimate stealth bugs, at least in PvP. We just fixed several of them. I can't recall if those were hotfixed or not.

Shaman
Did spirit wolves get nerfed?
We haven't made any changes to the wolves intentionally. (src)

Elemental single-target DPS
In our testing, Elemental did single-target dps in various levels of Naxx gear that was on par with other dps specs. But since there seems to be a concern among Elementals that they don't scale well with gear, I'll put a blue on this thread to give them a chance to explain those concerns. (src)

Elemental AoE
We have several ideas on AE for Elemental:

A modification of Thunderstorm.
A modification of AE Totems.
A modification of Chain Lightning.
A new spell. (src)

Purge
We have no plans AT THIS TIME to change purge. That's not a promise to never ever change it. Any dispel changes we might implement are weeks or months away, and purge is not ever specifically mentioned as a problem in those discussions.

Dispelling can be a pretty cool mechanic in PvP. We just need to tone down the annoying, frustrating and overly random parts. (src)

DPS - Balance druids vs Elemental shamans
We don't think Balance dps is far above Elemental at 80, if in fact it's high at all. Posting numbers from a theorycrafting spreadsheet does not provide solid proof. The only way to detect a trend at all is to generate very large datasets of both specs in a raid setting. Nobody actually has access to those data yet. Until then, pretty much everything is speculation and informed guesses (even on our part).

We do think that there may be a problem where Elemental's dps will eventually drop down because they don't have as many scaling talents as Balance. But this won't occur with gear currently available in the game -- it's more of an eventual risk and we have plenty of time to address it. It's also possible that Balance scales too well. That's why we haven't taken any steps to adjust either spec so far.

If I had to guess, we will redirect some of Elemental's deep talents more towards raw damage than just utility, but that's just a guess at his point and not an official announcement. (src)

Warlock
Ghostcrawler on "we don't want metamorphosis to be permanent"
When I say we don't want it to be permanent, I mean that we don't want another class that doesn't look like the player race.

When we're tossing around potential new spells in an expansion, one of the guidelines is to avoid adding a long-term pet or a long-term alternate form. We feel like we have gone to that particular trough to drink plenty of times already. From a lazy designer perspective it's easy to look to other classes when coming up with new ideas, so we try not to overdo that. Having a permanent demon form just crosses a line for us. We already have druids and Shadow form.

When I said one of the reasons we rejected Camo because stealth was supposed to be a special thing for rogues and cats, hunters challenged that notion by trying to appeal to logic or pointing out other inconsistencies. But this isn't the kind of thing you can debate your way into or out of. We just don't want to add more pet classes or more shifting classes to the game.

Summoning a temporary pet is fine, though we've almost done that one to death, and turning into an alternate form temporarily is fine. (src)

Developer list of things to accomplish
When we set out to work on the classes in Lich King, we had some specific goals for each one. Our mission was not to overhaul every class. We had specific things we want to accomplish.

For locks, the list looked something like this:

Give Destro a rotation that involved more than just Shadowbolt.
Make sure Affliction had dps comparable with the difficulty in pulling off the rotation.
Get locks to care more about pets without it just being Imps in PvE and Felhunters in PvP (and sac'ing pets as often as possible).
Get the Felguard back out and make the Infernal and Doomguard not a joke.
Make the dps stones something someone might actually use.
Make Affliction care more about Shadow and Destro fire.
Get Demo back into the PvE game again.
Get rid of the hassles with demon training.

Now that Lich King is virtually done, we've moved on to some different topics. This is a partial list, but includes things like:

Make sure locks do rogue / hunter / mage level dps at 80.
Make sure locks have enough survivability in PvP (since we nerfed a lot of it).
Fix some of those deep Demo talents that really aren't worth the investment.
Make shards more interesting and less of a hassle.
Get the Voidwalker (and possibly Succubus?) back out.
Look at the dps spells that cost shards.
Try and make more of the dots a consistent length, so that Affliction's rotation doesn't require such a big brain.
Get dots to either scale with crit or just crit.

I know that's vauge, and I'm reconstructing the list off the top of my head. Of course I imagine we'll add to that list once we see what the 3 specs actually look like at 80 with thousands of people playing them. (src)

Metamorphosis & Demonology tree
The taunt is there because we thought it might be fun in a 5-player instance for the warlock to be able to tank once in awhile, especially if the main tank goes down on a pull. It's not the signature ability of Metamorphosis.

We don't have a problem with the spell. It is useful in PvP and provides a nice damage buff in PvE. Some of its abilities, like the Immolate, can be useful in the right situations. (src)

It was said in a blue that Demonology = PvP Spec while Destruc is turning into PvE spec
What I said, and I clarified later, was that Affliction and Destro seem to do competitive damage in PvE. Demo is lower than that, which is not ideal, but we are also concerned Demo's survivability might make it the only raiding spec if its dps was just as high. In the meantime, we think people will still spec Demo because it is useful in PvP.

Our new design is there are no PvP vs. PvE trees. But it will take some time to reach this point because we didn't want to rip out every talent of every class and start over. The death knight has 3 trees with different flavors, but no PvP, PvE and tanking tree. The warrior and hunter are a lot closer to that than they used to be. We're working on all the others, including Demo. (src)

Pets
I doubt raid leaders are going to be bringing death knights just for Hysteria. The whole point is nobody brings something unique to raids so important that it gaurantees them a spot. Locks still have several very potent buffs -- it's just that there are other ways to get those now too.

The Felhunter was just too well-suited for PvP. There was no reason to bring any other pet.

We would like to get the Voidwalker a little more use besides just leveling though. (src)

Developer Q/A (src)
Destruction - Choas bolt, Instant. (Why, because destruction is still way to dependant on Casting+Stationary , LOS, and being locked out of spell trees. Mostly make it instant for pvp but would also help pve dps if locks decided to go this path.) I know hunters have simular line of sight complaints but I beleive this is hurting destruction a lot more then our hunter friends.
We're talking a lot about warlocks in PvP right now. Instant-cast spells may or may not be one of the changes we'll make. Ultimately, changing Chaos Bolt and Haunt to instant just makes them different spells. We would have to nerf them significantly to make them instant, which would have PvE ramifications. Warlocks do have a fair number of spells they can cast while moving.

Demonlogy - Give demon form a permanent form for warlocks, especially if your going to be succeptable to MORE cc then you were before IE Turn evil and Banish. (Why, because "I know blizz hates it when we compare classes but" every other talented form regardless of damage reduction abilities is permanent if you spec into it" So unless this is a failed attempt at Beastial Wraith which may I remind you makes you immune to All types of CC not adds more) As well Give Soul Link the 5% bonus damage back, not sure who in the world decided to take this away.
We don't want warlocks to be in demon form all the time. I think we've explained the Soul Link change before.

Other major Fixes - Give us back our old Self Buffs, the New fel armor is not cool and the Armor on Demon armor is downright terrible. I guess this is complaining so my solution, fel armor, 130 spell dmg and 30% more + healing, Demon Armor 2000 Armor+ and increased health regen.
What is your beef with Fel Armor? Our internal testing found that once you have gear with Sprit on it that it can improve you dps by 20% or even more. You may be low at your current levels without Spirit. That will change in just a couple of weeks.

There is talk about dispel resistance for destruction! this is kick ass and long overdue, what about for the few dots demon locks use?
We're looking at dispel resistance for locks in general.

Warrior
Deep Wounds
There were several bugs with Deep Wounds. We believe we have those all fixed now so we need to observe the changes for a bit before we decide if any further changes are warranted. (src

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